Dungeon layouts and enemy behavior changes will save you from backtracking as much.
If there was one prominent criticism of Diablo 4’s beta, it was the lack of dungeon variety and the monotony of the objectives within them.
Blizzard published a blog post today that looks a lot like patch notes for Diablo 4’s June 6 release. Among a list of class changes, there’s a section about how Blizzard took all the beta feedback and tweaked the layout of several dungeons in the Fractured Peaks zone.
“Our primary goal with the layout changes was to reduce certain kinds of backtracking which detract from a player’s experience,” Blizzard says. While it doesn’t specifically demonstrate what changed, I imagine the dungeons have more connected paths for you to quickly get to where you want to go.
Dungeon events, the spontaneous objectives that challenge you to kill a bunch of demons for loot, now have a 60% chance to spawn, up from the 10% chance they had in the beta. I cleaned through many dungeons in the beta and only remember encountering a few of these, which led me to race for the exit instead of exploring every inch of the space.
The Diablo 4 beta was full of blocked paths and secondary objectives to open them. You had to break off into two side paths and search for the items to bring back. The whole process was extremely tedious, especially if you had already seen the same objective several times before. Blizzard agrees and has made it so carrying objects gives you a speed boost and planting them restores your health, resources, and potions. Similar adjustments will come to the dungeons that require you to pick up keys, too, Blizzard says.
And when you need to clean out the last demons in the dungeon, they will start to move toward you so you’re not checking under every rock and pile of bones.
The post goes on to list a ton of tweaks to the game’s five classes, including buffs to Barbarians and Rogues, a nerf to Necromancer corpse explosions, and several changes to Sorcerers.
Diablo 4’s endgame video recently revealed a bunch of ways to collect gear for your characters. Nightmare dungeons add difficult enemies and objectives into dungeons you may have explored before, which Blizzard said is the reason it wants to avoid completely randomized layouts.
Diablo 4 is set to release on June 6.
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